From elephant ivory crucifixes to rhino horn handles for Muslim ceremonial daggers, sacred wildlife products fuel an overlooked driver of the illegal trade. This unbridled demand is pushing some ...

To save elephant populations from extinction, the international community banned the sale of their ivory—but selling mammoth ivory remains legal, and the two are difficult to tell apart ...

Demand for ivory is rising, fueled by an increasingly affluent middle class in China and the Far East where ivory is seen as a symbol of wealth, status and power.

“There are concerns that this is happening with mammoth and elephant ivories." The post Scientists develop new tool to detect illegal elephant ivory appeared first on Talker.

The number of legal ivory stores in China shot up from 31 in 2004 to 145 last year, while the number of ivory carving factories increased from nine to 37 over the same period.

Six tons of carvings, jewelry, trinkets and tusks were being reduced to powder Thursday afternoon (Nov. 14) as the United States, for the first time, destroyed its ivory stockpile.

Some quick maths suggests that approximately 84,945 tonnes of elephant mass was removed, over 17 years, from the ecosystems which these animals contributed to – roughly equivalent to three times ...

Right: Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Selling elephant ivory—a hard white material from elephant tusks, for which elephants are often killed—is illegal.

Poachers are using a sneaky loophole to bypass the international ivory trade ban—by passing off illegal elephant ivory as legal mammoth ivory. Since the two types look deceptively similar, law ...

As China grows richer, the demand is growing for elephant ivory smuggled from Africa. Despite occasional crackdowns and even prison sentences, it's not hard to find upscale Chinese shops that sell it.

Now our new study, published in PLOS ONE, presents a major breakthrough – using a well known laser technique to tell mammoth and elephant ivory apart. Our results couldn’t come soon enough.

Although wooly mammoths are long gone, their recovered ivory lives on as a legal alternative to banned elephant ivory. Scientists can now use lasers to differentiate between the two materials ...